Nights Like These
by casapazzo
Summary: The years may pass, but some bonds never fade.... R/L


Disclaimer: They're not mine, don't sue. I'd have to pay you off in chocolate chip cookies, anyway. And yes, I know a wolf and a wolverine aren't the same thing, but having a small, vicious, ferret-like creature running around Rogue's bedroom is just creepy. Feedback please! 

She wakes on nights when the wolf is restless, prowling somewhere outside. She quivers slightly – no more than a mental shiver – as her internal compass swings, compensating for his moves while she slept. A little bit north and a whole lot west. Perfectly attuned to her own private signal wave, on nights like these she can find him faster than the Professor and Cerebro could ever hope to. 

Weighted velvet whispers across hardwood, punctuated by the click-click of claw-nails. The wolf can walk silently when he wants to, but tonight he wants her attention. So she rises from her bed, cotton sheets gliding off of skin, fluttering aimlessly away. Nights are the only time she has to herself, the only time she can be sure of being alone, locked away with her lethal body, and she embraces it, unbinding that which all day _must_ be contained. 

Her bare skin pebbles in the chill, and the low, rumbling growl from the foot of the bed sets her every hair on end. Glowing yellow eyes rove possessively over her form. She feels their weight as she crosses the room and poses for him before the window. Moonlight makes a translucent veil of her skin, pearlescent with pixie dust, an ice carving with pulsing cobalt veins. Every line, curve, and angle is pure, untouched. The others are afraid to, though they should know better, and the cascades of apprehension, anxiety and fear have stilled her. Now she welcomes her glacial shield, adds to its depth and breadth and shapes herself within its confines. The heat pouring off the wolf's eyes might melt her – but any touch other than this, and the carven goddess will shatter. 

The enhanced senses he left her with allow her to pick apart the darkness overhead, adding light where most eyes find none, and seeing, instead of black, the deepest midnight blue between the too-sharp stars. A small stream of Greek and Roman names tumble out from between pursed lips as she traces out the skeletons of fantastical creatures from a memory storehouse not hers. She finds on nights like these that if she concentrates hard enough, the stars will abruptly yank themselves into different patterns of the sky over Oklahoma, or Montana, or Saskatchewan. On nights like these she knows he's dreaming of her. 

Startling thick bristle-softness presses warm against her calves and a cool damp muzzle noses comfortingly into the lax curve of her palm. She caresses spiky fur, tangling her fingers through the tight-woven undercoat until the creature rests its head against the lean lines of her thigh. 

She hears his voice, low and intense from the back of her mind, overriding her own thoughts, her own words. Sometimes she thinks if she can turn around fast enough, she'll catch him leaning cockily against the wall, one dark eyebrow arched in (usually) testosterone-fueled amusement. Then it was a struggle not to snap at Scott, call him One-Eye and rattle his obsessive-compulsive need for order. If she wasn't careful, she would catch herself admiring Jean's snug sweaters and the way the blood rushed to stain her cheeks when flirted with – especially in front of her easily needled fiancé. 

Her more recent opponents – those she faced as Rogue, not Marie – she has learned to lock away, to touch, to take their energy and talents, but not be touched in return. Her other voices, her other victims, are mostly silent, faded into her like old scar tissue. If she looked hard, she could find Erik's brilliant, vicious remnants, a pale, shiny scratch across her psyche. She generally preferred not to look. David – so brief and long ago – was only the faintest echo of a ghost, occasionally flickering into being on nights when her mental craving for physical contact raged up and sank anguishing talons into flesh hyper-sensitive from lack of sensation. David would wonder with an innocent curiousness why on those nights she would remember her first sight of Logan – his shirtless back a leonine column of taut muscle simmering with repressed violence – and weep for wanting. 

By her touch, by her "gift" she knew the feel of his sinew and bone from the inside: the pull of the shoulder blade in the wind-up for a punch or in the casual stretch of sliding on a shirt. Worse, she knew its interactions with other bodies. With all of his memories she absorbed the sharp scratches of a woman's fingernails clawing at his spine, the tightening in the lower back before each thrust and the maddening glide of skin on skin, the scent and cling of someone else's sweat mingled with his. On nights like these, she wakes tearing at her own skin, trying to rip away the phantom sensations that will never truly be hers to experience.

Two times she drank from him. Two times deep enough to nearly kill. As the months and years passed after that last touch on top of the disfigured monument, she expected the temporary transfer to be absorbed and fade, like the others eventually did. But still his voice, his memories, his senses came 'round, all close to the surface, frequently pawing to get out. It didn't help that every time he came back – those brief, infrequent appearances – he always reached for her again. Never enough to trigger her power, but he flirted with it, unable to fight the craving. In tugging playfully at her white locks of hair his fingers would skim across her temple and cheek; when he left again, as he inevitably did, his warm breath and lips would barely caress the light slope of her forehead. Each time his fingers, his mouth, would linger a tiny bit longer, taunting the death coiled under her skin, daring it to reach out, snap out for a fresh energy source.

She has no way of knowing if the repeated contacts are all one-sided, or what will happen if she drains him a third time. On nights like these, does he wake up tangled in her dreams, knowing which direction Westchester is in before he even opens his eyes, and fear being trapped inside her solitary skin? 

The wolf snaps long teeth at her, startling her from her reverie. Annoyance radiates off the black beast in palpable waves and his growl's rumbling vibrations resonate down to her bones. She shivers as her mind catches up with the body that has been standing uncovered under a winter's moon for too long. 

Back in bed, she settles the weight of the covers around her satisfactorily and curls onto her side, facing the window. The wolf has faded away, more silently than he came. She wraps her fingers around the dull metal edges of his dog tags – the ones he never reclaimed, but left as proof of her possession – and thinks of the night sky over the Canadian Rockies. 

Sooner or later the lodestone of pale skin will draw him back east again. On nights like these, she sleeps, and waits for her wolf to come home. 


End file.
